Brian Wake

ETCETERA

We graze for hours through the densely structured argumentsabout what is and what is not, the genesis of patterns framedand hung for all to see. But we are prisoners.

Have taken for granted that a fundamental markof our distinction is the time somebody takes to understandthat we are not the cut-out clouds they thought, constrained by all their own subjective contours, not mere inkblots or the accidental shape of cattle, chiaroscuro cows abstracted into analogues of what a glance reveals, but prisoners.

Some days we are reduced to inference, can only dream the great stampede, of thundering through the landscapes room by room, can only hope that there will be someone to see us more than mere etceteras.

And in the evening, when everyone has gone, when the walls we hang upon are being washed and hoofprintsscrubbed out of the polished floors, a portrait of a woman comes with fists of grass. Now eat, she says. We do. Now, carrying a glass of painted raindrops, drink. We drink.